The Czech simulationists are off to the red planet. Their next “Take On” game will be Take On Mars, which puts you in the position of remote Mars explorer-person, “allowing you to control the various, fully simulated mobile Rovers and stationary Landers. With this scientific arsenal at your disposal, you will work your way through the numerous Science Missions in each location, unlocking the secrets of Mars’ distant past.” What? A game developer knows the secrets of Mars’ distant past? What strange conspiracy is this?

I read an Arma 3 bug report stating that the AI can apparently actually cross bridges in the current dev build, so I guess that’s something. I don’t remember the AI being nearly as bad at following roads in OFP and Arma as they are in Arma 2 though.

I hope they don’t dumb it dow with simple WASD controls and cheap third person view mode. I want to write a separete script for every movement the bot makes for every moving component it has, and control it through staticky low res B/W first person camera view with a 4 minute input lag.

On a second thought, they should just dumb it down, and use some creativity… because driving those things in the middle of martian nowhere sounds more boring than mass effect 1 planet exploration.

It’d be nice to go, where no man has gone before, but that feeling would probably fade away pretty quickly when you realise that you are in an endless desert with 0 water, food, air, a temeperature way below 0 degree, and constant deadly radiation due to a lack of magnetosphere. Even if all of those weren’t an issue, you’d die of boredom.

X-Plane has had a simulated Mars for years, though the latest version ditched it. It has 1% atmosphere density but 1/3 gravity (roughly) which meant the best designs were rocket-powered gliders. There’s a typically Austin Meyer account of it hereabouts;